Trustworthy Clouds - Privacy and Resilience for Internet-scale Critical Infrastructure

Protecting critical infrastructures providing communications, energy, or healthcare presents increasing ICT challenges as ICT itself has become vital to them.

Internet-scale ICT infrastructures (“Infrastructure Clouds”) promise scalable virtualised computing, network, and storage resources over the Internet. They provide scalability and cost-efficiency but pose significant new privacy and resilience challenges.

Clouds may evolve into a single point of failure, threaten all dependent ICT, and put the Future Internet at risk.

TCLOUDS builds a resilient Future Internet platform by progress in four areas:

• Addressing the legal and business implications while building a regulatory framework for enabling privacy-enhanced cross-border infrastructure clouds.

• Architecture and prototypes for a federation of trustworthy infrastructure clouds that build on complementary and mutually re-enforcing technical approaches:

1. A Trustworthy Infrastructure Cloud enables individual providers to offer more resilient and privacy-aware infrastructure clouds accessible via open interfaces.
2. Privacy and Resilience for Commodity Clouds enables end users to put a security layer on top of existing commodity infrastructure clouds to enforce their security objectives. This enables integration of commodity clouds into the TCLOUDS federation.
3. Federated Cloud-of-cloud Middleware offers privacy-protection and resilience beyond any individual cloud. This expands trust from trusted (enterprise-internal) clouds to less trusted (off-shored) ones, or federates a set of partially trusted providers into a trustworthy and adaptive federation that furthermore prevents lock-in to a given dominating offering.

• Validation and impact through cloud scenarios:

1. Smart power grids connect renewable energy sources and users. It is a premier example of an Internet of Things.
2. Home healthcare provides prophylaxis to citizens. We focus on the privacy and usability challenges of cross-border usage of personal data.
   Collaboration with complementary standardisation and FP7 projects maximises impact and fosters an Open European Trustworthy Cloud ecosystem.

Oxford's involvement  is chiefly in the scientific activity of the project, developing previously sketched research architectures into viable detailed designs, and undertaking analysis of these. Furthermore UOXF will be in charge of end-to-end security for applications as well as job security manager for controlled data access. The University will play an important role in dissemination through scientific publications and conferences, and continue to play host to conferences and summer schools in relevant topics.